North Korea declares war, or something

posted at 8:31 am on March 30, 2013 by Jazz Shaw

So now can we deport Dennis Rodman to Pyongyang? No? Well, you don’t know until you ask.

In case you’d already gone to bed and missed it, (like me) it appears that the latest in the line of vertically challenged Dear Leaders in North Korea has had enough of the United States and South Korea doing… whatever it is we do that annoys them, I guess. Probably all that bothersome food we make sure they get each year. Anyway, they’ve found their casus belli and have decided to declare war.

North Korea said on Saturday it was entering a “state of war” with South Korea in a continuing escalation of angry rhetoric directed at Seoul and Washington, but the South brushed off the statement as little more than tough talk.

The two Koreas have been technically in a state of war for six decades under an armistice that ended their 1950-53 conflict. Despite its threats few people see any indication Pyongyang will risk a near-certain defeat by re-starting full-scale war.

You can read the full declaration of war issued by Kim Jong-un here, assuming you can make it through the broken sentence structure. Hey, I’m not trying to go all ugly American on you here. I’m sure that if you’re fluent in the language and heard it read aloud in the original version, it’s probably a stirring, patriotic, muscular statement of power and glory. But once it makes it through the discount translator into English for the press conference, it comes off a little more Heckle and Jeckle than Churchill.

The moves of the U.S. imperialists to violate the sovereignty of the DPRK and encroach upon its supreme interests have entered an extremely grave phase. Under this situation, the dear respected Marshal Kim Jong Un, brilliant commander of Mt. Paektu, convened an urgent operation meeting on the performance of duty of the Strategic Rocket Force of the Korean People’s Army for firepower strike and finally examined and ratified a plan for firepower strike…

1.From this moment, the north-south relations will be put at the state of war and all the issues arousing between the north and the south will be dealt with according to the wartime regulations.

The state of neither peace nor war has ended on the Korean Peninsula.

2. If the U.S. and the south Korean puppet group perpetrate a military provocation for igniting a war against the DPRK in any area including the five islands in the West Sea of Korea or in the area along the Military Demarcation Line, it will not be limited to a local war, but develop into an all-out war, a nuclear war.

I just don’t know what you do about these clowns at this point. Their people are sitting there starving to death in the midst of many other nations which have at least come into the 20th century, if not the 21st, and are enjoying the benefits of living in the real world. I realize that Ed already pointed out that North Korea isn’t entirely a paper tiger and could cause some actual trouble, but the real question over there is whether or not China can get Little Kim back on his leash.

If push came to shove, we could probably destroy their entire military infrastructure – at least the technological part of it – in 48 hours or less, but we’d likely take out a fair portion of their population in the process. And that just turns into a PR nightmare with the rest of Asia, and particularly China. Then again, maybe Kim heard that our re-order money for bunker-busters was, well… you know. Sequestration.

In the end, this is probably just another stunt by the new leader to impress his people with how macho he is and to whip up their patriotic feelings. It’s always better to get your people unified against a perceived foreign threat than to give them too much time to sit around and realize they don’t have anything to eat. It’s just another day in Pyongyang, I guess. But I still think we should send Rodman back, and he can take that little Gangnam Style pop singer with him and drop him off in Seoul on his way.

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